The Power of Their Glory: America's Ruling Class, The Episcopalians
Kit & Konolige, Frederica
BOOKREVIEW The Power of Their Glory: America's Ruling Class, The Episcopalians Kit and Frederica Konolige /Wyden Books / $12.95 E. Digby Baltzell It is hard to write any book, even a bad one, and...
...What a book...
...Not only do Kit and Frederica have a curious sense of our language...
...597, the church whose bishops are members of the House of Lords...
...One would have thought that a more convenient tool might have been used...
...What does "warped through" mean...
...Thus the assistant secretaryship of the navy is "a post that is catnip to Episcocrats, including FDR...
...The Anglican Chiirch is the Church of England-the established church of the country, supported by grants from the kings since England went Christian in A.D...
...Gentling low-Protestants is surely a novel sociological process...
...On the following page, the authors find that "the Kin-solvings have continued to sprout clergymen frpm their roots in Baltimore and their place in the Social Register and on Fisher's Island with the likes of the Du Ponts...
...I know a lot of non-Episcocrats who drink cocktails on all possible occasions Moore, moreover, may be a Bostonian in the authors' minds, but he was born and raised in the Mojrristown area of northern New Jersey...
...Paul's nor any other New England "prep school" was founded or run by the Episcopal Church...
...As St...
...An , awful lot of history is misunderstood in that sentence...
...On the same page, they discuss the Mellon Bay in the National Cathedral in Washington, which was donated by the Presbyterian Mellons, Episcocrats who also support the National Gallery...
...Mussolini, so I was told in my youth, fed castor oil to those he disapproved of...
...He may, finally, be a biological descendant of "social Episcocrats of the late nineteenth century," but he is surely not their "spiritual descendant...
...Paul's...
...And, by the way, neither Groton nor St...
...Not only do factual inaccuracies mark almost every page of this book...
...Its authors have little respect for facts, no feeling for grammar or language, and, above all, seem to suffer from what child psychologists call a "short attention span...
...Thus, ' 'Episcopalians warped through all these social developments...
...he was also the son and grandson of Congregationalist missionaries to the Pacific Islands (he was born in Honolulu...
...This is indeed a new and spongy concept, and the authors have an ingenious ability to make anyone of wealth and privilege into an Episcocrat...
...I never knew that the social register was a place like Baltimore or Fisher's Island...
...A few pages later, the authors discuss how Bishop William Lawrence was not only a founding trustee of Groton School but also a leader of Bar Harbor society...
...Kit and Frederica have nothing but nice things to say about most Episcocrats, including Jonathan Bingham, a graduate of Groton who represents the Bronx in the House of Representatives...
...Kit and Frederica also have a very odd sense of language and style...
...its old-family clergymen encouraged by their words and presence the development of these institutions of exclusivity and involvement in them by the new-weal thy converts who were flocking to the church...
...According to them, and in accord with their thesis, Representative Bingham is "the son of Hiram Bingham, a self-made New York millionaire who capped his career by heading to Washington as a senator, much in the tradition of many other rich businessmen at the turn of the century, when the Senate was known, perhaps with even more justice than today, as the 'Millionaires' Club.' " But Hiram Bingham went to the Senate from Connecticut where he had previously served as governor...
...Among Lawrence, Bishop Duane, and Bishop Greer of New York, Mount Desert Island supported a greater per capita population of Episcopal clerical heavyweights than any other square miles in the country...
...In a chapter oddly entitled "Cultivating 'Episcopal Emotions,' "things become curiouser and curiouser...
...I suggest that the professors who taught Kit and Frederica at Haverford and Yale be made to read this book word for word, cover to cover...
...How many square miles per bishop, or bishops per square mile...
...BOOKREVIEW The Power of Their Glory: America's Ruling Class, The Episcopalians Kit and Frederica Konolige /Wyden Books / $12.95 E. Digby Baltzell It is hard to write any book, even a bad one, and so as a rule I prefer to ignore obviously bad books rather than review them...
...nor was he a self-made millionaire but rather an amateur explorer with a Harvard Ph.D...
...Powerof 'Their Glory' (whatever that means) is...
...their sense of history and theology is weird...
...Paul's School, according to Kit and Frederica, is a great breeder of Episcocrats, John D. Rockefeller-"the richest and most devoutly low-Protestant capitalist of the nineteenth century"-must have sent his only son there...
...John D. Jr.," they write, ' 'had begun gentling the family money by attending St...
...It well illustrates what is wrong with American publishing-and American education...
...According to the Konoliges, the members of America's ruling class are "Episco-crats...
...Anecdotal paragraph follows anecdotal paragraph, with no factual, temporal, or logical connection between them...
...But The...
...Finally, the attention span of the authors is suggested by their discussion of various presiding bishops of the church, which they end with this sentence on Bishop (but not presiding) Paul Moore, Jr.: "But the most prominent Episcopal clergyman of the present day, hero of the radical-chic, New York-oriented types who are the spiritual descendants of the social Episcocrats of the late nineteenth century, is the personally wealthy and socially impeccable Bostonian Paul Moore, Jr...
...One of the Mellon Bay's pillars," they write, "is carved with the fagade of the National Gallery...
...How in the world does one "practice" a cosmology...
...Thus, in their chapter on the "Church of Contradictions," they note that Episcopalians practice "an elaborate, Catholic ritual and fullblown cosmology...
...The book has been well-publicized (a six-page news release announces "Now meet America's ruling class"), but it is both badly written and badly edited...
...Sometimes, as with the prep schools, the church founded and led these developments from the beginning...
...The reader now expects some discussion of Moore, but he is not mentioned again until some three hundred pages later, when the authors describe a banquet at the Plaza Hotel in New'York where "after an exercise in the quintessential Episcopal social occasion-cocktails-Moore was his charming, storytelling, old-family best...
...Yet Kit Konolige, according to the dust jacket, is a magna cum laude graduate from Haverford, and his wife and co-author, Frederica, has a Ph.D...
...Henry VIII of course is never mentioned...
...Moreover, neither John D. Rockefeller, Jr., ftor any of his sons attended St...
...from Yale...
...Then they cover the history of Anglicanism: "Anglican means English...
...such an inexcusably bad book that it should be reviewed...
...who taught for various periods of time at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton...
...Paul's...
...Similarly, according to the Konoliges, Ralph Adams Cram, famous advocate of high-church Episcopalianism and Gothic revival architecture, must have graduated from Groton, even though he was the son of an impecunious clergyman and was well into manhood before Groton was founded...
...One would have thought that the editors at least might have cleaned up the following sentence in the section of acknowledgments : "And it is fair to say the book would not have been done at all without Peter Wyden, who had the original idea, and arranged for further ideas to emerge out of the manuscript by close and painstaking editing [italics mine...
...Let us hope it is not a symbol of things to come...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
